500 additional jobs for Ubisoft in Quebec

They will do whatever is selling at the time. Back in 2008 Ubi's casual lineup (Imagine, petz etc) was pretty strong and driving most of their profits so they opened two studios in Brazil to pump out even more crap in less time. Their plan was to start with a core team of 20 people and then grow to 200 after 4 years. After 2 years, the tides changed, nobody was buying those games anymore and they decided to focus on their "core" franchises again. They didn't think twice before shutting down both studios and laying off people around the world when that happened.

All I'm saying is, even if they do create 500 dev jobs now if those jobs are in mobile or something very specific they won't think twice before laying off those people when the tides change again. And that doesn't apply to Ubi only, every time I see news that some game studio is ramping up like mad in a short amount of time that raises a red flag for me.

If there's one thing I learned from the Ubi lay off is to always be prepared for one, this industry is extremely volatile and you can lose your job quickly when things don't go as planned.

Quote from seir

Adrian Chmielarz (Bulletstorm guy) said that mobile is dead and somehow he's right. Mobile is dead for small punks, big players are in the business, there's more than 50 new games per day. Mobile is not a green island now but indie games are. To get attention on Steam Greenlight you need to make a really nice game, know how to do it. There's talent, idea and effort needed, just like on mobiles but the there's not so much active devs and the audience is bigger so the cash is better.

That's my opinion, I dunno, maybe I'm wrong. I just hope that masterminds from giant corporations won't abandon AAA or will stay on PC/consoles...

Steam has ~40 Million players. Between September 2012 and March 2013 1.4 Million Android smartphones have been activated daily. That isn't even counting iOS. According to Flurry 39% of time spent in smartphone apps is spent in games (67% on tablets!).There is definitely a discovery issue on mobile and I'm sure that the average gamer on Steam is willing to spend more money on a game than the average mobile user, but the audience is bigger on mobile (and growing). Ubi wants in on the action, too.